Olympus

With the total blog reads exceeding the height of Everest (these days 29029 ft) I thought I would regale you with a story of another high peak, Olympus, more specifically the jet engine that bears the name. It was used on the Vulcan and the Concorde.
Although not originally designed by him, it will always be associated with Sir Stanley Hooker whose autobiography “Not much of an engineer” is a must read for engineering students. He made his name by doing some small modifications to the Merlin engine supercharger, increasing the power by 25%. Then he came up with the idea of using 2 superchargers in series, effectively doubling the power at high altitude. Mind you, it took Hives, the boss of Rolls Royce to suggest using it in the Spitfire!

Those projects would not have happened without Hookers leadership.
Having made such improvements to the Centrifugal supercharger he thought he was one of the world’s leading experts but then in 1940 he met Frank Whittle who he realised knew more than he did about the subject, Whittle having used the Centrifugal type in his jet engine. The mutual respect between the two led to the Nene engine, a derivative of which powered the Mig15. How the Russians got the technology is interesting but Sir Stafford Cripps was naïve in specifying that they should not be used for military purposes!
Interesting discussion on thishttp://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=18002.0

One of the opposing aircraft to the Mig15 in the Korean war was the P80 Shooting star which was also powered by a derivative of the Whittle centrifugal jet. The T33 trainer which derived from the P80 was built in substantial numbers and still used the centrifugal jet as did the Mig17 which had an afterburner. Hooker helpied the Chinese with their copy of the Russian copy of the Nene 25 years after he designed it! He joked that the Russians had even copied the mistakes

The Nene was the “needle” engine to American engine makers especially after Cripps’ mistake.

It is the 80th anniversary of the first flight of the Spitfire. Mutt Summers was the pilot. See his Wikipedia entry for how he got the nickname. He is second in the number of types flown with 366. More famous these days for his test flights of Barnes Wallis bouncing bomb prototypes. Good obituary here: